Modernizing Banking Architectures with Apache Kafka ft. Fotios Filacouris

It’s been said that financial services organizations have been early Apache Kafka® adopters due to the strong delivery guarantees and scalability that Kafka provides. With experience working and designing architectural solutions for financial services, Fotios Filacouris (Senior Solutions Engineer, Enterprise Solutions Engineering, Confluent) joins Tim to discuss how Kafka and Confluent help banks build modern architectures, highlighting key emerging use cases from the sector. 

Previously, Kafka was often viewed as a simple pipe that connected databases together, which allows for easy and scalable data migration. As the Kafka ecosystem evolves with added components like ksqlDB, Kafka Streams, and Kafka Connect, the implementation of Kafka goes beyond being just a pipe—it’s an intelligent pipe that enables real-time, actionable data insights.

Fotios shares a couple of use cases showcasing how Kafka solves the problems that many banks are facing today. One of his customers transformed retail banking by using Kafka as the architectural base for storing all data permanently and indefinitely. This approach enables data in motion and a better user experience for frontend users while scrolling through their transaction history by eliminating the need to download old statements that have been offloaded in the cloud or a data lake. Kafka also provides the best of both worlds with increased scalability and strong message delivery guarantees that are comparable to queuing middleware like IBM MQ and TIBCO. 

In addition to use cases, Tim and Fotios talk about deploying Kafka for banks within the cloud and drill into the profession of being a solutions engineer.